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Yes, do it! Posted by Saabpilot [Email]  (#134) [Profile/Gallery]
(more from Saabpilot) on Mon, 7 Jun 2004 20:53:50
In Reply to: Re: Is it foolish not to ground a Satellite dish?, jp, Mon, 7 Jun 2004 13:55:43 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
I echo the prior comments by jp. It is both smart, safe and required by the code. Take it from a many year ham radio operator and electronics-type guy who has seen the results of lightning hits. Is your house and your family worth an unsightly ground wire? Yes. And yes, your insurance company may try to deny your claim if they find out should you be unfortunate enough to suffer a lightning strike or other catastrophic event (just last week a house a mile from me took a direct lightning hit resulting in $80,000 of damage).
With due respect to the degreed electrical engineer I don't agree about tying the grounds of the coax together as your only means of grounding the outside antenna. Yes the coaxes should already be grounded by means of an outside grounding block that probably came with your dish. But that doesn't do the same thing as grounding the antenna itself. Being that the antenna is out in the environment it needs a good earth ground not only for static discharge but for dissipating higher voltages. Noisy radio signals are often cleaned up by proper grounds (speaking in generalities here of course). Of course with a direct lightning strike all bets are pretty much off anyway. That's why most electronic equipment comes with a warning buried somewhere in the operations manual about disconnecting antenna wires from the equipment in the event of a storm. Many radio operators have a coax switch that grounds their coax directly to an earth ground when storms are in the vicinity.
Also, if you look at ANY commercial antenna structure you will notice a large, typically braided ground strap tied directly to an earth ground. Same exact reason, same exact principle.
I have a Dish Network antenna on my house and yes, it is ugly but I have the ground going directly to a grounding rod. In fact to have the best ground possible you should use an 8' ground rod. These are a pain in the a$$ to pound into the ground but are the safest. [Look at me preaching but mine is only a 4' one...the one that grounds my ham radios and ham radio antennas is an 8' though.] And it is VERY important to use a direct ground wire cut as short as possible. Do not loop it or otherwise use all the ground wire that came with the dish if you don't need it all to reach the ground. To be effective it must be as short as possible. In fact the horrible silver ground wire included with the home installation kits for the dish antennas really should be thrown away and you should pay a few bucks at the hardware store for good quality copper ground wire. Ask any electrician and they'll agree.
Enough of my preaching. Good luck; the self-install kits for the dishes are pretty easy to use. And by the way I really have seen multi-thousand dollar radio systems and other electronic systems destroyed by improper grounding. Personally I fried a surge protection station on my PC a few years ago because of a high voltage hit on my incoming phone line during a thunderstorm (the surge station protected the phone line as well as the power lines). It sucked to have to spend $100 on a new high quality surge protection system for the PC but it was alot better than losing the entire computer not to mention all the data on the hard drive....the grounding is well worth the investment and appearance issues. Signed, Brian the Ham Radio Geek and Saab Lover.
posted by 207.239.20...
, Mon, 7 Jun 2004 20:53:50 <-- Viewing This Message
, Tue, 8 Jun 2004 16:32:47
, Tue, 8 Jun 2004 07:28:23, Tue, 8 Jun 2004 13:18:59
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